I don’t care if wool is in or not. All i care about is what works best for me. And so far that is wool. I just love my Icebreaker.

The thing with synthetics is the cold flashes. When you stop to eat your powerbar or GORP or sth, the synthetics dry like crazy at the expense of your body heat. So every time i stop in a synth shirt i get cold, almost immediatly. That doesn’t happen in my wool shirt. It keeps me warm at all times even when it’s wet.

Despite what some on this site may say about that there are no fabrics that are warm when wet. Wool is. It can absorb about a third it’s weight in water and still feel warm. A synth shirt cannot do that.

There is another, though not so important, good quality of a natural fabric. If in a rare case you are cought in a fire (leaking petrl stove causing a big flame) your synth shirt, made out of oil, will melt into your skin :S.

Only thing wrong with a wool shirt is that at times i tend to overheat. But that usually isn’t a problem since i prefer hiking in cold whether.

There is a clothing manufacturer in New Zealand called iRULE. They have a lot of interesting wool blends including wool and possum, http://www.irule.co.nz/shop/
Their focus is endurance racing/mtn.biking but the clothing is real nice. Here let me hold up this long sleeve top so you can see it.

One of the better wool products I got my hands on last year was sold by Duluth Trading Co. #75035,75036.
The top is cut 3″ longer in the back and has thumbholes so it does ride up when you pull on outerwear. $42.50 each piece.

Wool has never really been ‘out’. Or if it has, thousands of adventurers all over the globe weren’t told.
As a dyed-in-the-wool Kiwi, [pun intended], I can vouch for generations of outdoorsmen downunder who have almost exclusively used wool gear … and survived.
Sure, it gets heavy when it gets wet [ the hi tech new stuff doesn’t ] but then they were tougher back then…

I weighed the top and it came in at 9.75oz. size XL and then I weighed my Smartwool next-to-skin lightweight top size L and it also weighed 9.75 oz. The bottoms weighed 8.75 size L. This also puts it in the range of Patagonia’s wool 3. The top has a little more material at the tail in back.